Healing Yoga: Proven Postures to Treat Twenty Common Ailments—from Backache to Bone Loss, Shoulder Pain to Bunions, and More

330 Pages·2015·4.53 MB·English

by  Loren Fishman

Healing
YOGA
Proven Postures
to Treat Twenty Common Ailments—
from Backache to Bone Loss,
Shoulder Pain to Bunions, and More
Loren Fishman, MD
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK • LONDON
FOR CAROL
my best friend,
first and last lover
and greatest teacher.
Contents
Introduction
PART 1 Back Pain: An Overview
PART 2 Musculoskeletal Back Pain
1 Quadratus Lumborum
2 Tight Hamstrings
3 Facet Syndrome
4 Sacroiliac Joint Derangement
PART 3 Neurological Back Pain
5 Herniated Disc
6 Stenosis
7 Piriformis Syndrome
8 Combination Problems
PART 4 Injuries and Systemic Problems
9 Rotator Cuff
10 Headache
11 Weight Control
12 Common Cold
13 Bone Health
14 Insomnia
15 Scoliosis
16 Premenstrual Syndrome
17 Depression
PART 5 Three Research Projects
18 Restless Legs Syndrome
19 Bunion
20 Plantar Fasciitis
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Sanskrit Pronunciation and Meaning Guide
About the Contributors
Notes
Index of Poses by Chapter
Alphabetical Index of Poses
Healing
YOGA
Introduction
Is Yoga for You?
M
AN, WOMAN, CHILD, senior citizen: the answer is yes. Novice, expert, teacher:
the answer is yes. In good, medium, poor physical condition and fitness: yes. In
my opinion, yoga is for everyone. Yoga provides physical and mental strength,
balance and flexibility. It improves coordination. It improves mood. It has been
used for thousands of years to treat common (and uncommon) medical
conditions. Yoga is convenient. You don’t need special clothes or shoes. If you
use equipment, it can be simple: an old belt, a book, a card table chair. Yoga is
democratic. Because so many people all over the world regularly practice yoga,
it’s easy to find. And it’s portable—you can do it almost anywhere: in the
backyard, on a plane, in a chair. Also, yoga is inexpensive or free. If I sound like
a yoga aficionado, that’s because I am.
Yoga has snugly fit itself into all parts of our society. You can do it in the
studio, in the gym or at home. It helps people in prison, those with cancer and
other illnesses, those who have returned from war. People of all ages benefit
from it. What an amazing thing! Theistic but nonsectarian, not a sport, not an art,
not exactly a science or religion. I am convinced that if all the world did yoga,
Earth would be more peaceful, if only because we would all be devoting part of
each day to improving ourselves.
Choosing Your Yoga
The practice of yoga started thousands of years ago in India. It’s a testament to
yoga’s usefulness, both physically and spiritually, that it has survived into the
present day, and that it has grown and evolved exponentially in a process that is
still going on. Think about it. When I was in my twenties and began doing yoga
in India with my teacher, B. K. S. Iyengar, hardly anyone was doing it back
home in the United States. It was thought of almost as a pastime of people who
were a little . . . eccentric.
Now more than 20 million Americans practice yoga. And since so many of
us are doing it, there is an almost infinite variety and richness of yoga types,
styles and hybrids to choose from. You can do it in the air, while sweating in
extreme heat, while laughing, while lounging in a swimming pool. You can do
yoga with your dog, your child, your lover. You can do it quickly or slowly,
competitively or not, with an emphasis on alignment, on breathing, on
movement, on meditation or chanting. Some mix yoga and Pilates or other
bodywork. You can find strictly therapeutic yoga to help you with just about
anything that ails you, from addiction to knee pain (more about that below). You
can go to class and learn yoga there. You can download courses or buy
instructional DVDs and teach yourself at home. And I have mentioned only a
few of the thousands of possibilities!
If you are not already a practitioner, the choices can be daunting, so I will be
bold in my recommendation to you. After practicing yoga for more than thirty
years, I suggest that you try the yoga I learned in Pune, India, when I studied
with B. K. S. Iyengar—the yoga and meditation I still practice every single
morning without fail. For me, Iyengar yoga has become a way of life. It’s
profoundly deep and complex, yet elegant; it provokes my thought and helps
keep my body healthy. Iyengar yoga is anatomically sophisticated and
therapeutically oriented.
I admire Mr. Iyengar for plumbing yoga to its depths to help people with
health problems both physical and mental. When I was with him in India, he
concentrated on alignment, which brought out the balanced, classic beauty in the
poses and had an almost immediate effect on my feeling of well-being. Mr.
Iyengar did not expect his students to have cookie-cutter bodies. In the classes I
took in the bungalow where he had his yoga studio across the street from his
home in Pune, there were fat people and thin people, tall and short people, old
and young. We were together in a room, six or seven of us, practicing in
whatever temperature Pune had to offer that day. Mr. Iyengar recognized that
everyone could not do every pose to its fullest and encouraged the use of
modifications to allow people to progress at their own pace. He introduced
blocks, straps and other props, which are immeasurably useful, especially for
beginners and for people who are older or have medical conditions.
This is not to say that I believe other ways of practicing yoga aren’t valuable
or good—many are. But those who teach Mr. Iyengar’s yoga have been through
a rigorous training over a period of years. They are prepared to teach, knowing
that it is possible to injure oneself doing yoga. If you can, I suggest that you take
Iyengar classes until you have enough experience to begin doing yoga at home,
on your own. No matter what type of yoga you decide to do, whether it turns out
to be temporary or a lifelong practice, the benefits are significant.
Doing Your Yoga
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell posits that it takes about 10,000 hours to
achieve mastery in a field. As a doctor, I have a medical practice. I go to the
office and see patients every weekday from 8 am to 6 pm. I have kept this same
routine and discipline for many years. The result of this constant reinforcement
of my profession is that I feel I am a better doctor now than I was the day I
graduated from medical school. I’m a better doctor than I was two years later
and twenty years later. The more I practice the more proficient I feel I become,
and I have completed Gladwell’s 10,000 hours several times over. Certainly that
maxim applies to yoga. In order to reap yoga’s benefits, you must do it. The
more regularly and seriously you do it, the more time you spend doing it
(assuming you have a good teacher), the more mastery you will achieve. I
understand that when a simple forward bend relieves a spasm in your back,
making you feel better in just a few minutes, you may dust off your hands and
think, Well, that’s that. But for benefits in addition to the physical, for that all-
important sense of emotional well-being, do yoga regularly. Practice it as if you
can become a master. Your progress may be slow, but I have seen
transformations take place in those who practice patiently and with dedication.
Yoga changed the life of one of my patients, a reverend who was so obese he
was beginning to have serious medical problems. His back, knees and feet hurt.
He sometimes had trouble breathing. He began slowly and agonizingly, doing
very simple poses and doing them with many modifications. As time went on
something happened, perhaps because of his teacher, Cathy Lilly. He became
interested in doing the poses. He got better at doing them. His self-confidence
increased. He felt motivated to lose weight. He practiced yoga at home, in my
office and even in Central Park, where, though he was still very heavy, he had a
photograph of himself taken doing a near-perfect Ardha Chandrasana pose.
Everything came together for this nice person. Yoga actually changed his life.
He lost weight, and the last I heard he had started jogging as well and was signed
up for a marathon. It sounds like a miracle. Maybe it was a miracle, but even if it
was, this man’s transformation began with yoga.